The Permission Society. Timothy Sandefur

well-known metaphor of the “marketplace of ideas,” which originated in Holmes’s Abrams dissent, is revealing: speech is protected only when it is public. Speech that does not occur in the marketplace – or a person’s desire not to appear in the marketplace at all – could not claim protection. His Abrams opinion was therefore entirely consistent with his pro-censorship views in Eugene Debs’s case: together, they recast speech as a permission government grants and can revoke to serve politicians’ notion of the public good.